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Custom SAP extensions powering Brenntag’s S/4HANA journey
Challenge
Brenntag, the world’s leading chemical distributor, has always been on the cutting edge of technology. However, with increasing complexity of their business, they started to wrestle with a classic growth headache: 77 countries, several ERP systems, and no single, reliable view of packaging data. How many containers does a customer in the UK have on site? When do deposits expire? Without that central truth, capital gets tied up, and important sustainability targets become harder to hit.
The group’s ambitious S/4HANA rollout program involving many internal and external stakeholders needed a robust sidecar application that could live outside SAP yet integrate tightly and provide the much-needed clarity.
Solution
Cloudflight built PackMan, a fully cloud-native packaging management application hosted on AWS, tailored specifically to address functional gaps that S/4HANA is not covering in the standard processes.
PackMan receives delivery, return and invoice events from SAP S/4HANA via REST interfaces, calculates and stores current container balances (including deposits, expiry dates and chemical details), and pushes the data back to SAP when queried. Users access a clean web interface to view balances, delivery history, and invoices. From kick-off in March 2025 to productive go-live in Ireland, the first country to use PackMan, in November 2025 – alongside the local S/4 rollout – the team delivered in roughly eight months.
Interestingly, the client’s process started bottom-up with raw data rather than textbook requirements. That gave our architects the right challenge but also a playing field to dive deep into data merging logic early and create a system that supports the already solid business model.
Architecturally, Brenntag decided to follow the Clean Core principle that SAP prescribes for S/4HANA transformations: the ERP core system remains free of custom modifications and therefore fully upgrade-ready at all times, as all additional logic is implemented as a side-by-side extension outside the core. In practice, this means that PackMan communicates with S/4HANA exclusively through released APIs and maintains its own data and models in a separate cloud database.
Integration is done with SAP BTP Cloud Integration and Advanced Event Mesh. This allows enhancements, changes, and deployments to proceed independently of the core release cycle – a decisive factor when a global template needs to be rolled out reliably across dozens of countries and over many years.
Value
Ireland’s live instance is stable and already proving its worth. It is exciting to think that with such comparatively small data volume, the platform provides huge business criticality and that makes us proud. PackMan sure punches way above its weight:
- Packaging planners see real-time stock at customer sites
- Freed up working capital and support for circular-economy goals
- Automatic notifications speeding up the return process
- Built for scaling – with data flowing into Brenntag’s analytics platform, metrics become straightforward group-wide
- Clean Core: the S/4HANA core system remains modification-free and therefore maintainable in the long term, significantly reducing upgrade and extension costs and risks for all future country rollouts
Our partner
Brenntag SE, headquartered in Essen, Germany, is the global market leader in chemical distribution. With roughly €16 billion in annual revenue, operations in over 70 countries, and more than 600 locations, the company supplies full-line assortments to industrial customers worldwide. The current global ERP harmonisation program (published Apr. 2026), supported by EY as implementation partner, aims to replace legacy landscapes with one standardised S/4HANA backbone. PackMan is a strategic building block in that journey – and Cloudflight, as a reliable long-term partner, is proud to be driving it forward, country by country.
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